Present methods of conversion from single meter installations to individual tenant metering and the like, generally provide a new service conduit from the utility supply network to a new bank of meter sockets, mounted on the exterior wall, say four on the average, each serving a new raintight multibreaker panel for each apartment. Conduits are then run back to the old multibreaker panel, which is used as a splice box only, where the old branch circuit wires are spliced to the new conductors, the old breakers panel interiors having been removed and discarded. The old combined multi-breaker panel may have been neatly mounted on the wall surface or recessed in the brick veneer in a space of approximately 14 inches wide by thirty inches high.
The revised installation involves rerouted service conduits, a wall space four feet in width by one foot high for raintight meter sockets alone, and an even larger area for the new multibreaker panels, and a plethora of conduits run on the surface from the new boxes to the old gutted panel, now reduced to a splice box. To compound the problem, there is usually not enough room for this massive amount of new equipment, since the old panel may have been mounted between windows, or at the corner of a building, where a vertical space of approximately one foot is all that may be available for conversion equipment.
The revised system thus is unsightly, takes up a great deal of wall surface, may have to be remotely located from the existing panel because of the lack of adjacent space, and is expensive for the foregoing reasons.
It would, therefore, be highly desirable to provide a novel apparatus which remedies these and related problems which remain in the prior art.